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Comment by wizofaus | Hacker News Reader

> probably sculpted by our evolution

I can't really begin to imagine what selective pressure could realistically have acted on this, certainly given the tiny period of time over which any substantial percentage of the population would have been using their hands to store information in any way.

If there's any correlation between use of computers and any loss of ability to memorise concepts (which I'm not convinced we actually have proof of) it could just as easily be explained by our tendency to "offload", knowing that any gaps in our memory/understanding can readily be filled by technology as needed.

I do worry about a possible future where we literally stop bothering learning how to handwrite at all, but mainly because there's still sufficient chance you might need such a skill at some crucial moment when computers can't be used. But it's surely sufficient just to know how to block print capital letters.

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Superficial take IMO.

Don’t need a selective pressure for a cognitive process to work in a particular way. You just need a selective pressure for the cognitive skill and for the way that skill works to at least not have a pressure against it, biology being full of engineering compromises.

Learning well with handwriting, IMO, has little to do with hands specifically, but memory and understanding in general, where the spatially situated product of the action (on a specific piece of paper used and then kept in a specific place) taken in a properly free form manner with much more analogue detail (paper is a blank canvas and handwriting will have nuance throughout a piece of writing) that most likely also slows you down and forces a huge number of little decisions all facilitate the task of memorisation and recall.

That spatially attendant information assists memory seems to me very plausibly consistent with primate evolution where most if not all tasks benefiting from memory would have had such information as either a fundamental component or readily associated.

For similar reasons, I think there’s something to be said for sorting important information in physical books on shelves, where the location of information in the physical space can aid recall.

I think it’s easy to forget just how weirdly disconnected and abstract the computer interface is from everything else we use in the world.

Ideally, computers ought to be driving at optimising for humans rather than merely what works well for the tech. I think that’s been left behind too much.

My guess/impression is that the act of writing something down passes the information through different parts of the brain, and then you have two independent memories of the facts.

But why shouldn't the same be true of typing?

(I did mention in my other post I can sort of see why handwriting is a movement more akin to other ways we manipulate the physical environment - but in fact I use the "swipe" style keyboard entry on my phone, which is surely not that dissimilar - using my finger to draw shapes. Touch typing is certainly very different and hard to correlate with other actions we need to perform in the real world, in some ways it's surprising we're able to become so competent at it, though obviously our ability to make finely tuned manipulations with our fingers is a huge part of our evolutionary success).

I'd speculate the bigger more elaborate effort of handwriting produces a stronger memory.

Well like I said above, I think the spatial details of where you’re writing and where the thing you’re writing on is located and the details of the spatial arrangement of your writing itself are all part of it.

A plausible hypothesis, sure, but not much more. It'd be interesting to actually investigate it properly.

For sure!

Though I'd also wonder if it's a tad more than a hypothesis given what we already know about memory both scientifically and, perhaps, from practices people have developed over time to aid memory. I don't know all that nearly well enough to put together the case, but the "memory palace" technique, which is ancient and apparently "tried and true" seems like a striking demonstration of the the basic spatial idea. If there's truth to that, I'd say my suggestion could be reframed as a strategy for using handwriting to aid memory rather than a mere hypothesis.

Regarding the "slowing down" aspect, as others have mentioned too, I'd argue again that this could be couched directly in well established ideas and understandings ... chiefly, I'd imagine, the processes of repetition, practice and synthesis that are essentially common knowledge. The slowed down process of deciding what you're going to write and how probably forces you into a cognitive loop that goes beyond the mere recording of information toward repetition and synthesis. My experience with typing is that the urge to simply record verbatim is more natural to the medium.

There has been studies that proved that handwriting helps memorizing better than using a computer. The studies took a group of students, randomly assigned them handwriting/computers then they had a test to pass. Handwriting students performed better.

The reason is that handwriting is slower, so it forces you to summarize and make decisions in your note taking. Selecting what's important. On the other hand typing is faster, so you can type everything the teacher says without understanding.

So you only need to slow a person down to achieve the same effect, what's the value of handwriting?

The mechanical motion involved, physically putting your thoughts down. It isn’t the same as typing at all where you just click a button, having to motion the letters and words is surely worth something in itself.

You don't click a button, you touch it with your fingers in a mechanical motion physicality putting your thoughts down, the letters and words, there is no learning-related conceptual "surely", just the fact that it's less efficient to do and redo, which in the poorly designed lecture situations can force you to stop and think instead of doing dumb transcribing

it's slower

It's not? You can artificially limit the speed of typing

you try that

Plenty of people I know handwrite faster than they can type! And have they tested those using shorthand?

What I could believe is that our brains might be better at remembering the sorts of movements our hands make while handwriting (essentially using your wrist and elbow) vs those made while typing (fingers only), perhaps because the former are closer to the act of manipulating the physical environment in ways that might needed for survival (gathering food etc.) and because you're physically tracing out a desired path in 2d space, though it seems tenuous at best.

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